In analog and digital audio, sound is transmitted and stored very differently.
Analog audio: positive and negative voltage
A microphone converts the pressure waves of sound into voltage changes in a wire: high pressure becomes positive voltage, and low pressure becomes negative voltage. When these voltage changes travel down a microphone wire, they can be recorded onto tape as changes in magnetic strength or onto vinyl records as changes in groove size. A speaker works like a microphone in reverse, taking the voltage signals from an audio recording and vibrating to re-create the pressure wave.
Digital audio: zeroes and ones
Unlike analog storage media such as magnetic tape or vinyl records, computers store audio information digitally as a series of zeroes and ones. In digital storage, the original waveform is broken up into individual snapshots called samples. This process is typically known as digitizing or sampling the audio, but it is sometimes called analog-to-digital conversion.
When you record from a microphone into a computer, for example, analog-to-digital converters transform the analog signal into digital samples that computers can store and process.
0 comments:
Post a Comment